As ICAN supporters will recall, Dr. Barney Graham was formerly the Deputy Director of NIH’s Vaccine Research Center (VRC) and chief of the Viral Pathogenesis Laboratory. Back in 2020, ICAN sued NIH to get access to his emails during the pandemic and won. We’ve been reviewing the emails as batches come in and you can read previous reports here, here, and here.
Lead Counsel, Aaron Siri, Esq., lays out the details here:
The latest batch contains a very interesting email in which a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation official introduces Graham at NIH to Ugur Sahin, CEO of BioNTech on February 2, 2020, stating, “I wanted to take a moment to introduce you to each other regarding 2019-nCoV.” In response, Graham says, “Thank you for your interest in our antigen design effort for CoV vaccines,” and the two immediately set up a phone call.
We know that the Gates Foundation bought shares in BioNTech back in September 2019 and so it is interesting to see it actively making connections for BioNTech so quickly. These emails occurred just 13 days after the first case of SARS-CoV-2 was found in the U.S. and over a month before the WHO declared a pandemic. In a follow-up email just three weeks later, BioNTech tells Graham that its “vaccine efforts are well under way” and that it is ready to discuss a “corresponding license agreement.”
In another email on March 13, 2020, a market research company reached out to Graham saying that stock markets were plunging and asking him to answer some questions to help them “understand the market sentiment of the vaccines industry towards COVID-19 vaccines.” Graham forwarded the email to the VRC Director and said, “FYI. I never answer inquiries like this, but do you think it might be appropriate for people like us to speak to the investor world and try to calm things down?”
Both these incidences show how the NIH acts just like a for-profit corporation with a vested interest in forming partnerships and worrying about financial markets—perhaps because the agency and many of its employees stand to profit from the success of the vaccines they develop, just like Graham did from the Moderna vaccine.
ICAN will continue to report on the Graham emails as more batches come in.
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